How Can AI Be The Most Useful In E-Commerce RIGHT NOW? transcript

what are you actually building at CTC that you can talk about publicly and whatever the answer this question represents is your bet on how AI is the most useful right now you know I'm assuming you're thinking about this problem from a cost to impact ratio perspective like what can make the biggest impact in the least amount of time and how do I balance those things with all the potential things AI can do so where where is it taking you uh what what do you you think the opportunity is what we're working on is the creative strategy system um and I I wouldn't necessarily say that is the highest Roi opportunity compared to like media buying or growth strategy or anything like that yet I would say they're all very comparable um but creative strategy is something that is particularly slow um and we felt like particularly in need of disruption because people are spending a ton of money on their creatives um and they're just not getting the outputs that they need um and it's a system that is kind of ripe for disruption for AI um so what we're doing is there's multiple different levels in the process and that we're building so there's kind of a foundational sorry there's a foundational data layer that um we building for automated concepting uh so or automated briefing so we're calling that the ultimate brief um and what that does is it pulls in multiple different data sources so it gets all of your product skew uh revenue and margin and inventory data um it get scrapes all of your reviews and other demographic data um and it also it will also pull in like your sales to look at marketing moments and everything like that um and what it does is it produces this really nice brief that gives a lot of context around sorry is it picking between different products like when you say it pulls in all that product level data is it giving some suggestion about about which products you should focus on next like yeah yeah exactly so based on inventory position and margin and probably skew velocity or something like that yeah exactly so you can say a business goal so you want to maximize topl land Revenue you want to focus on highest margin or you want to sell something that is um in stock right now in inventory so we will be able to kind of pull all that in and we also relate a review to a specific product so the more powerful thing that we can do is we like we can do this full workflow we can say I want to sell something that's my highest margin product um so and then I want to see all the reasons why someone said they were buying that specific product through my reviews and I want to see the exact Persona that I identified or the exact audience that I identified as the um person who was buying it so I can look at what my product was what my offer is who was buying it and why they're buying it um and all of that to create these briefs and create those Concepts and so then it's going so you set you set the business goal it gives you the product suggestion and when it gives you the product suggestion it gives you the briefs as well like that add briefs yep yep so um when we think about concept as like an offer an audience and an angle um it automates that entire process and it can also look in the um the seasonal element of your brand like where you are and this is another reason why AI is um is powerful because it has that intuition so you know around the time of year you're in how that relates related to your previous year's Revenue graph um is there a marketing moment you can take advantage of and how does that relate to your Concepts so okay that's really interesting so it's going to to then give you the place to start for for all of that is um yeah that's that's very fascinating the and what you're describing there is a really good indication of this because like you know I've talked to Taylor plenty of times I've probably done episodes about this he's done episodes about this about how to how to pick which uh product to advertise next and it's it's it's weighing this combination of yeah of of yeah inventory position uh um goals uh yeah value to the yeah and what and and all you're doing there is saying that there is a rubric that's happening in our minds here so why are why why would I try to go think through that rubric with my very um yeah limited capacity and instead have ai go perfectly execute my rubric you know and I'm assuming what will happen there is that you'll end up in some spaces where it will not do exactly what you want it to do and you'll have to figure out where it went wrong and um and sort of keep problem solving that I I could imagine yeah but yeah yeah that but I mean that's of course going to happen with humans too and uh and probably at a lower error rate with AI you know yeah I mean and even the volume game kind of evens it out eventually but it's like is can we expect a creative strategist to have um to be considered all of the product sales data and inventory data for every single skew like imagine if you're a complex brand like an apparel brand it's just not fair for people to be considering all of that at once and then also having to consider why people are buying it and who's buying it and then having to do that um having to do that like a 100 times a month like it's it's too much for a human brain to comprehend at scale because that's one brand so now you have to do it across multiple Brands so it's a very difficult thing to do but it's something that's super easy and super Well Suited to AI so it's a really it fits in really well and the results are really really cool too what part of that process could I do like could I can't build that I don't think I don't think but what what could I build with the with the tools where they're at now um you could get access you could create a more manual version of this um that you're able to use so you could export your product sales data from Shopify you wouldn't have to use the API um and you can paste it into whatever bi tool you want to use or Google Sheets for example and you could order it um you you could probably do an element of the review scraping data that we use um I I think that we could come up with Frameworks to make it efficient and work well for you um it wouldn't be entirely it wouldn't be entirely automated and it wouldn't be the same level of detail um but if you thought about very specific Frameworks that you want your AI to think about your reviews in um and broke them down into different brok them down more into chunks or bulk and then pasted them in and then got the results and compared those that might be a way that you could more easily um that you could get more value out of your reviews um I would then make sure that you keep the product IDs associated with the reviews because most reviews um DOA they'll give you that and then you can paste it into chat GPT and ask it to join your product sales T um table to your review table so now you've joined those together and you have a relationship there um and you could probably graph that data and get an insight into your um marketing calendar that way too so you could create a semi you yourself with a bit of hard work could create like a semi-automated a little bit more manual version of this um I think it would be the final output which would be hard for you to automate which is automating the process of Concepts and briefs and everything like that how have you um outputed these briefs yet uh We've outputed um specific Concepts uh but there's a whole there's a whole other part of this that we haven't even spoken about which is where a huge amount of my time has gone into which is automating actually creating the ads themselves yeah which might be interesting to talk to [Music]